Seattle survived the NFC West Challenge because it deserved to, and the team that won this division was by far the best in the universe.

Win the NFC West, conquer the NFL.

The 49ers had their chance to get a jump on the dynastic talk in last season's Super Bowl but lost to Baltimore in the final seconds.

Kaepernick was probably a little too raw and the 49ers defense wasn't quite running on all cylinders at the time.

Jump forward a year, and the 49ers were probably better this season than they were last season ... but so was Seattle.

The 49ers might be even better next season -- and you know what? So might Seattle, which is bursting with young stars.

And both teams keep getting better partly because they have each other to deal with and plot against.

Iron sharpens iron, as 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh has said, and the smartest, strongest teams force their rivals to get even stronger and smarter.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the division, Arizona won 10 games (and beat the Seahawks at CenturyLink Field in December) and missed the playoffs, despite fielding one of the better defenses in the league.

And St. Louis started pulling it together later in the season, has a bunch of premium draft picks coming and probably won't be a pushover itself in 2014.

So, this all definitely reminds me of another time and another set of title-worthy teams in a single division ...

From Super Bowl XVII (Washington over Miami at the end of the 1982 season) to Super Bowl XXX (Dallas over Pittsburgh at the end of the 1995 season), an NFC East team made it to nine of the 14 Super Bowls.

And won eight.

The NFC East won 57 percent of the Super Bowls in that period -- three by Dallas, three by Washington, and two by the New York Giants.

That was not a free-and-easy time to win titles, either -- it came while the 49ers were winning four of their own Super Bowl championships.

But back then, the NFC East was run by Bill Parcells, Joe Gibbs and then Jimmy Johnson; and Pete Carroll, Jim Harbaugh and maybe Jeff Fisher can be comparable to that.

The NFC West teams' architecture has strong similarities to those NFC East clubs': great general managers putting together physical, ground-oriented offenses and aggressive, talent-stocked defenses.

As this Super Bowl proved again, it's easier to keep a great defense going at top speed deep into the playoffs than it is a great offense.